


The Party Don't Start 'Til I Drop Dead

by myrtlebroadbelt



Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, Gen, Ghosts, Halloween, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Partying, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-08 22:01:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18903502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: Kelly glanced briefly at the flyer and gave it back to him. “You’re such an idiot.”“No, what’s idiotic is having the gift of immortality and choosing not to die in front of dozens of people on the scariest day of the year.”





	The Party Don't Start 'Til I Drop Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between S02E06 and the Christmas special.

Nathan ran his tongue over the fangs in his mouth and took another drag on his cigarette. He would have done this for free, he decided, putting on his most ghoulish face for an approaching couple.

As it was, a frantic guy in a Dracula costume had accosted him outside the community centre an hour earlier, mumbling something about his wife being in labor and him needing to be there, and would Nathan please hand out these flyers for him?

“How much’ll you give me for it?” Nathan had asked, as he was particularly skint this week.

The guy had rummaged in his pockets and produced six pounds twenty, which he had stuffed into Nathan’s hand along with a set of plastic vampire teeth, still wet with saliva. He had then slapped a pile of orange papers against Nathan’s chest and clumsily thrown off his black cape before hurrying away.

“I’m Nathan, if you want to name the kid after me!”

He was about to toss the pile in the bin and trade his earnings for a kebab — keeping the fangs for future pranks and sexual roleplays — when he caught a glimpse of what the flyers were advertising.

HALLOWEEN PARTY FOR CHARITY, read black words made to look like they were dripping with blood, WERTHAM COMMUNITY CENTRE, 31 OCTOBER, 8 - 11.30 PM, AGES 18+, PLEASE WEAR A COSTUME, £5 ENTRANCE FEE GOES TO HOMELESS YOUTH.

As a homeless himself, he was touched. But he also had a brilliant idea that would require as many people attending this party as possible. So with a gangly flourish, he tied the cape around his neck, shoved the teeth into his mouth, and set out to wander the estate pestering people in his worst Transylvanian accent — made even more incomprehensible thanks to the fangs.

“I vant you to come to this Halloween party,” he told the guy and girl currently passing with their arms around each other. “I hear some seriously spooky shit is gonna go down. You don’t vant to miss it.”

“Bite me,” said the guy, refusing the flyer Nathan offered him.

Nathan laughed. “Vampire humor. Classic.”

He approached four more passersby, each of whom presented him with a completely different obscene gesture — including one he had never even seen before, but would store away for later. None of them accepted a flyer. He supposed he was going to have to try a different tack.

He spotted a group of girls hanging out by the lake and stomped out his cigarette.

“Hey, ladies! You like _Twilight_?”

 

 

That night, Kelly came round the community centre with burgers, so he pocketed his kebab money for tomorrow and sat with her on the mezzanine.

“Hey, can I ask you a favor?” he said when they were almost done eating. When all she did was throw him a skeptical look, he continued, “Will you chop my head off?”

Kelly froze with her Coke can halfway to her mouth and stared at him.

“I’d ask one of the others,” he added, “but I figured you’d be the most reliable, what with all your previous murdering experience.”

Kelly slapped him on the arm. “Why the fuck would you want me to chop your head off?”

“Well, I can’t exactly do it myself, can I? That makes sucking yourself off look easy.”

“You still haven’t answered my question, dickhead.”

Nathan pulled a wrinkled flyer out of his back pocket and handed it to her. He had actually managed to hand out the rest of them after a few hours — although the stack hadn’t been very large to begin with.

“There’s gonna be a party here on Halloween,” he explained. “And I figure, what’s scarier than a man getting decapitated, only to rise from the dead unscathed a few moments later?”

Kelly glanced briefly at the flyer and gave it back to him. “You’re such an idiot.”

“No, what’s idiotic is having the gift of immortality and choosing _not_ to die in front of dozens of people on the scariest day of the year.”

“I thought we weren’t telling people about our powers.”

Nathan shrugged. “I’ll just say it was an elaborate prank, with mirrors and shit. You can make anything look like anything these days.”

Kelly sighed and crumpled up the empty take-away bag.

“Come on, it’ll be fun. You lay down some newspaper, I’ll grab the fire axe, and we’ll do a practice run,” he said as Kelly stood up. “Aren’t you the least bit curious how I’ll come back? I mean, will I grow a new head, or will this one just roll itself back on? Hey, why don’t you film it for me?”

He leaned over to retrieve his phone from under the blanket. When he turned around again, Kelly was gone, and he heard the door close heavily below.

Fine. He’d just get someone else to do it.

 

 

“I’m not chopping your head off, you prick,” Curtis said across the bar.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to go to prison.”

“Nah, man. I’ll come back to life and tell everyone I was cool with it,” Nathan assured him. “And anyway, if things do go south, can’t you just do your little _Doctor Who_ trick and change things?”

“I’m not taking my chances, thanks.”

Nathan groaned and turned to Alisha, who was perched on the barstool next to him filling out a job application. “What about you?” he asked, leaning over. “Maybe you can strangle me.”

Alisha looked up at him long enough to roll her eyes.

“Listen, it’s perfect,” he said, snapping his fingers as the idea developed. “You touch me, I start talking about all the nasty stuff I want to do to you, and it’ll look like self-defense. Plus, I won’t remember any of it after. Win-win.”

“Nothing about that is a win-win.”

The door opened and Nikki stepped in, prompting Curtis to move to the other end of the bar and kiss her hello. Nathan took the opportunity to reach over and pour himself a drink.

“You gonna pay for that?” Nikki said over Curtis’s shoulder.

Nathan pulled away from the tap and chugged the quarter of a pint he’d managed to fill up before Curtis could catch him. He slammed the empty glass down triumphantly. “Say, Nikki, how would you feel about murdering me?”

Nikki took a seat next to Alisha. “My pleasure, as long as you stay dead.”

“Oh, you are all hilarious,” Nathan said with a belch.

“Why do you even need us?” Curtis asked, snatching the glass away from him. “Can’t you just off yourself?”

“Yeah, I thought about that, but what are my options?” Nathan started counting on his fingers. “I haven’t got a gun, so blowing my brains out is off the table. Slitting my wrists and bleeding out would take too long, and the ambulance would probably get there before I could die. If I took pills, it’d just look like I was passed out drunk.”

“You could fall off the roof again,” Alisha suggested.

Nathan scoffed. “What do you think I am, a one-trick pony?”

“You could hang yourself.”

They all jumped. Simon was standing between Nathan and Alisha, hands in his pockets, as if he had been there the whole time.

“Where did you come from?” Nathan asked.

Simon grinned. “Boo.”

“Well, at least someone’s getting into the Halloween spirit!” Nathan whooped, slapping Simon on the back. “Barman, get this gentleman a pint of lager. He just gave me the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

Curtis sighed and poured Simon a drink. As soon as he set down the glass, Nathan grabbed it and took a gulp — spilling half of it in the process. Curtis gave him the middle finger, but Simon just smiled and put a fiver down on the bar.

Nathan wiped the foam from his upper lip. “So, Barry, about this hanging thing. Are we thinking I do it from the mezzanine, maybe with some dramatic music playing? And I make some big speech about ending it all, and the girls are screaming, ‘No! Don’t do it! We haven’t shagged you yet!’”

Simon shrugged. “Sure.”

“Cool, cool.” Nathan was glad Kelly wasn’t around to hear what was going on inside his head as he thought about what it would feel like to dangle there. “Hey, want to tag along and help me out? You can even do your whole ghost act. It’ll be a nice starter, to get them good and spooked before the _pièce de résistance_.”

“Alisha and I were going to spend Halloween together,” Simon said.

“Oh, right. I forgot you two were …” Nathan mimed a few vigorous thrusts, and Alisha’s lip curled. “Except I guess it’s more this sort of thing, eh?” He transitioned into a wanking motion. “Well, you can spend your night doing that, or you can spend it watching a real-life _Night of the Living Dead_. Take your pick.”

Simon looked at Alisha. “You did say you wanted to go to a party.”

Alisha tapped her pen on the bar, glancing between them. “Ugh, fine. But if they put you in a body bag” — she pointed at Nathan — “I’m not saying anything.”

 

 

The night before Halloween, Nathan settled into the staff office with a bag of burnt popcorn from the kitchen and scanned through every station on the television until he found something sufficiently gory to watch.

He stopped on a film that looked to be from the ‘80s, featuring a blonde actress with big tits taking her sweet time walking down a darkened corridor. The soundtrack was heavy on the violins as she approached one of the doors, lights flickering overhead.

Nathan hoped there were no hangings in this — he was worried that seeing it might put him off the stunt, and he couldn’t risk looking like a pussy.

Horror-film girl reached for the doorknob, and Nathan sat forward in his chair. Just as she began to open the door, there was a knock on the office window behind him, and he turned to see a pale face staring at him through the glass. It was only after he leapt out of his seat and sent every last kernel of popcorn flying into the air that he realized it was only Simon.

“Jesus!” he gasped, clutching his chest as Simon opened the door and stepped into the room. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, and I’m saving my dying for tomorrow.”

“Sorry,” Simon said with a smirk, and nodded to the television. “What are you watching?”

Nathan looked back to see the blonde girl from earlier lying on the floor with her throat sliced open. “Shite,” he replied, and turned it off. He returned to the desk chair and put his feet up. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to bring you this, for tomorrow.” Simon held out something magenta-colored.

“What is it?”

“It’s a noose.”

Nathan accepted the bundle of rope and wrinkled his nose. “Did you steal this from Suicide Barbie?”

“What?”

“It’s pink!”

“It’s my mum’s,” Simon explained. “She uses it to tie her bike to the car when she goes cycling.”

“Oh, that’s lovely. Do you happen to have a Sainsbury’s receipt for me to write my farewell note on?”

“You don’t have to use it,” Simon told him, moving to take it back.

“Now, hold on a second,” Nathan said, turning away from him. He gave it a closer look. “Where’d you learn how to make one of these, anyway?”

“The internet.”

Nathan slipped the loop over his head experimentally and glanced down at himself. The pink was practically neon, and stood out against his black T-shirt. He shrugged. “I suppose it could be kind of punk rock. Thanks, man.”

Simon sat on the edge of the desk. “Do you know how you’ll do it?”

Nathan hadn’t given it much thought — quite intentionally, as doing so made him queasy. “I guess I’ll just kick a chair out from under me or something.”

Simon gave him a nervous look. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it will take longer to die that way. If you jump from higher up, it’s more likely to snap your neck.”

Nathan thought back to his birthday, to climbing over the railing of the mezzanine in his novelty football slippers and reaching up to turn off the smoke alarm. He didn’t remember hitting the floor. The only sign that he had broken his neck was the nasty crick when he woke up — and Kelly’s retelling of the event later that day.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Or maybe his neck wouldn’t snap, and it would be much, much worse.

“Where’d you learn that?” he asked Simon.

“On the internet.”

“You really need to clear your search history, mate.”

Simon chuckled. Then, likely noticing Nathan’s brooding expression, he told him, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

It was bad enough having Kelly read his thoughts with her power. Now Simon could do it just by looking at him? He was not feeling this.

“Do you want to chop my head off?” Nathan asked.

“No.”

“Then you leave me with no choice.” He took his feet off the desk and brushed a piece of popcorn out of his hair. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to rest up for my big day tomorrow.”

He sauntered past Simon and out the door, swinging the pink rope like a feather boa as he climbed the stairs to bed. He waited until he heard Simon leave to pull his mattress as far away from the railing as he could.

 

 

Nathan sniffed yesterday’s black T-shirt and deemed it clean enough to wear under his cape. A suit would have looked even more badass, but he ruined the only one he had the first time he died.

While the volunteers were setting up for the party, he spent nearly an hour in the toilets slicking his hair back with a comb and an old bottle of styling gel he’d found in one of the lockers. Eventually, he got it greasy enough that it stopped coiling itself back up — well, mostly.

He was in the locker room checking himself out when he heard the door creak open, followed by the sound of high heels on tile. He turned to see Kelly walking into the room wearing fuzzy black cat ears. She had drawn whiskers on her face with eyeliner.

Nathan grinned at her. “You’re here!”

She leaned against one of the lockers. “Yeah, well, Simon called me and said you were planning on hanging yourself, so I figured I should be here to make sure you don’t screw it up.”

“Aw, you do love me.”

“Shut up.”

Nathan gave her outfit a once-over — a skin-tight black dress over fishnets and patent leather boots so shiny he could see his reflection in them. _I would still totally shag her_ , he thought. When he looked back at her face, she was smirking at him. _Oh, shit. She heard that._

“Thanks,” she said, not seeming to mind.

“Well, how do I look?” He turned to the side so that the cape’s high collar covered the bottom half of his face, and raised one eyebrow seductively.

Kelly walked over and patted his head. “What’s going on here?”

“Don’t ruin it!” He jerked away from her, tucking an errant curl behind his ear. “It took me forever to get it like this.”

She smiled. “Are you coming or not? The party’s started.”

“All right, I guess it’s time to meet my audience.” He adjusted his cape in the mirror and took his fangs out of his pocket. “You know, there’s still time if you want to …” He made a cutting motion at his neck.

“I’m not chopping your fucking head off.”

“Worth a shot.”

The party was already filling up when they reached the main hall. Orange and black streamers hung from the ceiling, and two glowing jack-o’-lanterns flanked the bar. Someone had set up a fog machine, which sent an eerie haze across the dance floor. “Disturbia” was blasting from the speakers as people dressed like mummies, wolfmen, and anonymous murder victims lined up for booze and pizza.

“Let’s hope there’s no garlic bread,” Nathan joked, baring his fangs. Kelly rolled her eyes, but he caught her smiling as she turned away.

They spotted Alisha on the other side of the room, dressed in a witch’s hat and striped thigh-high stockings. Someone taller was standing beside her wearing a white sheet to look like a ghost. Upon closer inspection, Nathan recognized the pair of shark eyes staring out at him through the two holes.

“Boo,” Simon said, his voice muffled by the fabric.

“Don’t wear that out, man,” Nathan advised, patting him on what he was pretty sure was his shoulder. “You’ve got some serious spooking to do tonight.”

The music transitioned to the _Ghostbusters_ theme, and more and more people filtered into the room, including Curtis and Nikki. “There was nothing on telly,” Nikki said with a shrug, sipping from a drink with a fake eyeball floating in it.

“I see you put a lot of effort into your costumes,” said Nathan, pointing to their matching headbands, which made it look as if they had meat cleavers lodged in their skulls.

“This was all the shop had left,” Curtis explained.

It warmed Nathan’s heart that all his friends had shown up to watch him die a horrible death — while also putting added pressure on him to actually go through with it.

He chose to put his impending demise out of his mind for the time being, and channeled all his energy into getting drunk, eating sweets, and dancing the night away. His cape made for the perfect accessory to accompany his moves, although he may have gotten a bit carried away at one point during “Thriller,” when he lost his fangs somewhere on the dance floor. As getting trampled by a crowd of people in fancy-dress wasn’t his preferred method of dying, he chose to let them go.

Nathan had to keep reminding Simon to do his invisibility trick when he got too distracted dancing with Alisha. His costume covered everything but his eyes, thereby making it safer for them to get close. Alisha and her hips were certainly taking full advantage of it. Nathan thought he might ask to borrow the sheet and have a go himself.

“Hey, Barry, go scare those two boners over there,” he said when Alisha went to the toilet and he realized that Simon had gone four whole songs without making anybody jump. He pointed to a couple grinding against each other in black and white skeleton onesies.

Simon nodded and got himself into that stock-still position he always assumed before disappearing. In a blink, he was gone (sheet included), and Nathan thought he saw a guy dressed as Frankenstein do a double take.

He looked over at the skeleton couple and waited. After a moment, Simon appeared out of thin air directly beside them, still wearing his sheet and doing his creepy not-moving act.

“Boo,” he said, and the couple nearly fell over from surprise. To be fair, they were also very drunk — but that only made it funnier.

Nathan doubled over with laughter. “That never gets old.”

The party went on like this for a few hours, and Nathan was having such a good time that he nearly forgot about his grisly plan for the evening’s end. He had just put a cherry-flavored lolly in his mouth to give himself that just-drank-blood look, when Kelly turned to him and asked, “Are you still planning on killing yourself?”

Nathan pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time — quarter past eleven. The party would be ending in fifteen minutes, and Halloween would be over not long after that. This was it. Now or never.

All that drinking and dancing apparently hadn’t loosened him up quite as much as he expected. _What if I don’t die right away?_ he thought. _What if I take too long to come back and they bury me again?_

He noticed Kelly staring at him with concern in her black-rimmed eyes.

“Just gonna nip to my locker and get my noose,” he said, trying to push through the crowd before she could overhear any more of his cowardly nonsense.

He didn’t get very far before she was tugging him back by his cape. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “If you’re scared to do it, then don’t.”

“Scared?” he said, taking the lolly out of his mouth and pointing it at her like a switchblade. “What do you take me for? I’m gonna give these fuckers a show they’ll never forget!”

Nathan tore his cape out of her hand and stormed away toward the locker room as “Werewolves of London” faded out and the DJ made a last call for requests.

He sucked aggressively on the lolly and pulled the noose off the hook in his locker. This was happening, and nobody could stop him — not even himself. After all, what was the point of having a superpower if you didn’t use it?

He slammed the locker door closed and jumped to see someone standing next to him. At first, he thought it must be Simon trying to scare him again, probably sent by Kelly to discourage him from going through with the hanging.

But it wasn’t Simon. It was some guy in a ridiculous cap who was scowling at him with a crooked mouth. He was wearing an all-too-familiar orange jumpsuit with a silver chain tucked into the collar.

Nathan scurried backwards as the guy charged toward him, cursing about being stuffed into a locker and thrown in the boot of a car. It was then that he put together who this was — Gary, the cunt who threatened to stab him on his first day of community service. Nathan hadn’t seen any ghosts for a while, but he figured Halloween would be the most appropriate time for one to make an appearance.

“I got fucking axed to death!” Gary shouted, bouncing on his trainers like a boxer and sticking his finger in Nathan’s face.

Nathan pulled the lolly out of his mouth to argue that they technically hadn’t been the ones to kill him, and he should probably take it up with that mental probation worker in the afterlife. But he was distracted by the fact that the stick came out clean, without the candy on the end of it. He wasn’t even able to argue anyway, because he had something caught in his throat.

After doing some quick maths in his head, he concluded it was the lolly.

He tried swallowing it, but it was too big. Then he tried coughing it up, but it wouldn’t budge. He slapped his chest, and then pounded on it with his fist, and then knocked himself on the back of the neck, but none of it did anything. So he just stood there clutching at his throat while Gary stared at him like _he_ was the freak.

Nathan assumed ghosts couldn’t perform the Heimlich maneuver, and Gary probably wouldn’t be up for it anyway, so he tried to do it on himself, crossing his arms across his stomach and thrusting into his belly button, to no avail. He remembered seeing someone in a film fall forward onto the back of a chair when they were choking, so he searched the room frantically, but couldn’t find one. They must have needed extra chairs for the party.

When it dawned on him that he was almost definitely about to choke to death, Nathan’s priorities changed.

He turned to leave the room, hoping to reach the party in time to collapse dramatically in front of the shocked crowd. Instead, he collapsed dramatically after only two steps toward the door, growing light-headed as he went longer and longer without air.

He fell to his knees first, grabbing onto the side of a locker to brace himself. Then he toppled over onto the cold tile and watched the fluorescent lights overhead become dimmer and dimmer as he lost consciousness.

“Little bitch,” he heard Gary say just before everything went dark.

Nathan couldn’t say he disagreed with him.

 

 

He woke up coughing. He could feel the lolly escape his throat and shoot out of his mouth across the room. With his windpipe finally cleared, he gulped air into his chest and let it back out with a long sigh. No matter how many times he died, he was still relieved when he came back to life.

“Fuck,” he heard Curtis say from somewhere nearby. “That hit me right in the eye, you prick.”

Nathan sat up on his elbows, blinking the world back into existence. He looked over to see the lot of them leaning against the lockers and staring down at him. They were still wearing their costumes, although Simon had pulled the sheet off his head and draped it across his shoulders.

“Welcome back,” Kelly said.

“How long have you all been standing there?” Nathan asked.

“About twenty minutes. We were gonna give you ‘til midnight and then leave.” She glanced at the clock. “You just made it.”

“Where’s everybody else? Didn’t you tell them I was in here?”

“The party’s over,” Alisha said. “Everybody’s gone.”

Nathan threw his head back with a groan. “Are you telling me nobody knows I died except you assholes?”

“Sorry,” said Simon.

“Well, thanks a lot. That’s really helpful.”

He should probably be grateful that fate had tossed him a way out of hanging himself, but he didn’t like dying for nothing. He could have at least gotten a laugh out of seeing everyone’s faces when he came to, and maybe even a shag from a cute goth girl. This was just a waste.

“What the hell happened, anyway?” Nikki asked.

“Oh, you know, just seeing dead people again,” Nathan replied, glancing around the room to make sure Gary wasn’t still there. The group raised a collective eyebrow at him, and he added, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s a first,” Curtis scoffed.

Nathan raised his arm, waiting for someone to help him up off the floor. Curtis and Nikki ignored it, walking past him and out the door. Kelly followed after them, muttering “dickhead” under her breath.

“Even if I could touch you, I wouldn’t help you up,” Alisha told him, which left Simon to step forward and grab his hand. Nathan stumbled to his feet, nearly pulling Simon down to the floor with him. His cape twisted itself around on him, and he flung it out of the way with his free hand.

“You can have your mum’s noose back,” Nathan told Simon when he was finally upright, pointing to where he had dropped it on the floor while he was busy dying.

“It’s just her rope, not her noose,” Simon corrected him, picking it up.

“Right, whatever. Jesus, my throat is killing me.” He dug in his pocket for his packet of Fisherman’s Friend and popped one on his tongue.

“Be careful not to choke again,” Simon told him.

Nathan laughed. “Can you imagi—” As he said this, he felt the cough sweet slide down his throat, and briefly grabbed at his neck in a panic while Simon and Alisha looked on with wide eyes. “Oh. No, it’s okay. I swallowed it.”

Alisha shook her head incredulously. “How did you ever survive before you were immortal?”

She and Simon headed for the door, and Nathan followed. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the way out, and winced at the state of his hair. It was probably a good thing no one had seen him after all.

“If you die on Halloween and nobody’s there to see it,” Nathan mused as they waded through a sea of sweet wrappers and plastic cups, “did it even happen?”

He supposed he would just have to try again another year. With every Halloween for eternity ahead of him, he’d have plenty of time to practice.

**Author's Note:**

> I like the idea of Nathan dressing in a costume and handing out flyers for any and every occasion. Also every show needs a Halloween episode — it is law.
> 
> This is my first Misfits fic, so I'd love to know what you thought. I must say, I never really related to those "writers have weird search histories" posts until I wrote about Nathan Young.
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](https://myrtlebroadbelt.tumblr.com/).


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